Frustration Using Apple News+

Nov 25, 2023

Apple News+ magazines on a 12.9-inch iPad Pro should look and feel amazing, but sadly that’s not the case today. In this post I’ll show what is frustrating about the experience and how things could be improved.

Magazine Covers

Here's a current A-list magazine and my iPad side-by-side. We can see they're similar enough in size:

Vogue December 2023 on the left, my 12.9-inch iPad Pro on the right.

Now here’s what it looks like when you open this magazine on the iPad:

The frustration begins and the reading experience is interrupted as soon as you notice you’re not able to see the whole cover without scrolling.

The cover photo is not fully shown and lines of text are unreadable.

The frustration continues a few seconds after starting to read the cover: it’s not sharp and in Retina-resolution, but blurry and noticeably pixelated. You’d be forgiven for thinking we're waiting for a progressive JPEG to load, but this is it.

A screenshot from my iPad at Actual Size in Preview. Go ahead and check out the image up close to see for yourself.

You see this with all sorts of other top magazines on the 12.9-inch iPad. Here are screenshots of blurry covers from Wired , The Atlantic , Sports Illustrated , and The New Yorker .

This is strange to me. How could this be? What part of the pipeline could be limiting the magazine covers from looking sharp?

The Fix

The covers should be sharp, Retina-resolution images. They would be a lot more fun to view too if they were "fit" instead of "filled" on the screen. Here's a quick mockup of how that could look:

It would be great to be able to see the whole cover without scrolling, no matter how the iPad and magazine ratios differ.

Tables of Contents

Here's the table of contents from that same issue of Vogue:

It's not that creative, but we do get a big photo from one of the big features and teaser summaries for the smaller stories.

Now here's what it looks like when you open the table of contents on the iPad:

The text-only treatment makes the table of contents not only drab but exhausting to use.

Again the reading experience is hindered by this design decision to make exploring magazines devoid of any of the visual richness of, well, magazines.

On a print magazine, you can flip through with your fingers and get a quick sense of the photographs within. On the iPad, you have to tap in and out of the table of contents going only off of these text titles that all look the same.

The Fix

The table of contents should be visually rich and hint at the photographs within. There could be interactivity here too, perhaps allowing you to preview a story without opening it, see estimated reading times, or save a story for later directly from the table of contents.

Here's a quick mockup of how it could look simply to add thumbnails to the existing design with no other changes:

Simple thumbnails of lead images would go a long way.

Thanks for Reading

I love Apple, I love magazines, I love the HI design teams at Apple... I love all of it. That's why I'm writing this post. All I want is for these things to be improved.

I admire the people who worked on this to get it this far. I know it must be difficult to be innovating in the magazine industry, where there have been nothing but headwinds for who knows how long. It's amazing to have this breadth of choice, rolled into Apple One, at my fingertips.

But, that doesn't mean that what this app offers today isn't frustrating. I'm someone who wants to use Apple News+, who wants to tell my friends about it, share stories, and keep paying for it for the foreseeable future. And yet, I can't because many small frustrations add up to an experience that I don't look forward to repeating.

I'll be waiting patiently for that silent update someday when Apple News+ suddenly gets a whole lot better, and rooting for them all the way.